USA: PayPal’s new app turns attention to business

diciembre 1, 2016

Periodista: María Alejandra Lopez🕔01.Dic 2016

PayPal is making life easier for businesses by releasing a new mobile application, aside from the main consumer-facing one, that is intended for businesses to help them keep track of their various financial data and decisions.

The app is called PayPal Business. It is meant to help businesses keep track of invoices and other important financial services, all in one mobile package.

“Our merchants’ needs and feedback are very important to us, so we’ve designed the PayPal Business app to provide them a centralized, mobile hub to help them manage multiple tasks more easily where ever business takes them,” said Arnold Goldberg, VP of merchant product and technology at PayPal. “And this is just the beginning of the journey to create an amazing app for our merchants. We’ll continue to add functionality and features that will help them grow their business.”

PayPal Business

While the dominant conversation about the ways mobile has disrupted the many industries that now make regular use of it as their main digital channel has focused on the consumer-facing aspect of mobile apps, it is also important to talk about the ways that mobile can revolutionize a business’ internal operations just as much as the consumer’s experience with it.

To that effort, PayPal has added to its mobile focus not just mobile apps that work for consumers but apps that also provide value to the businesses that use it.

The new app, PayPal Business, lets businesses create and send invoices so they can keep track of to where and why their money is being sent.

The app also provides a number of other features that can all be accessed at any time and anywhere thanks to PayPal Business.

Business owners can transfer funds, view transaction deals, issue refunds and check account balances all with a just a few taps of their fingers. The app keeps track of multiple accounts related to a business, removing the necessity to check multiple financial channels and streamlining the process of fiscal responsibility for business owners.

Finally, the app allows all of a business’ customer’s details to be viewed in one place. If a customer requires a refund, business owners can quickly and easily pull up the customer’s transaction details and all pertinent information to make the process quick and easy.

“We’ve added the PayPal Business app to our portfolio of apps — PayPal Consumer app and PayPal Here app — because we know that merchants have different needs and tasks to manage their business and to get paid while on the go,” Mr. Goldberg said. “It compliments PayPal’s e-commerce solutions by delivering a seamless mobile experience for merchants while providing key functionality such as creating and sending invoices and withdrawing funds.”

Financial services

As financial services become increasingly popular on mobile devices, it is important for providers of those services to branch out from solely consumer-facing applications to focus on business-facing ones as well.

PayPal has been expanding it mobile options in a variety of ways, most prominently through partnerships with some big names in the world of finance.

The money-sharing platform recently partnered with Mastercard to become a part of the credit card company’s Masterpass system of mobile payment providers and options.

The company has also begun working with Visa a for a similar strategy in letting consumers and Visa-users have easier access to PayPals’ subsidiary, Venmo.

PayPal is banking on the ubiquity and convenience of mobile to expand its use outside of consumer-facing initiatives and into workplace options that make life easier for business owners.

“For merchants and consumers, we’ve seen a dramatic shift to mobile since PayPal’s One Touch was introduced globally a year ago,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We’re continuing to work closely with merchants to understand how they can track their operations on the go. It’s important to us to solve for what others don’t have — the portfolio of tools to light up mobile accessibility to millions of merchants.”